1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Pere Goriot by
Honore de Balzac

Lost Illusions by
Honore de Balzac

Madame Bovary by
Gustave Flaubert; translatedby Lydia Davis

Glass Bead Game by
Hermann Hesse

New York by Edward
Rutherford

Language of Mathematics by Keith Devlin

Giants and Dwarfs by
Allan Bloom

I Never Walked Alone: The Autobiography of an American
Singer by Shirley Verrett

Consuelo by George
Sand

Social Animal by
David Brooks

Comprehension and Collaboration by Harvey Daniels and Stephanie Harvey

The Way the Crow Flies by
Ann-Marie MacDonald

Movies

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Opera DVDs

Samson and Delilah with
Shirley Verrett

Macbeth with Shirley
Verrett

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1991).
Either I’ve forgotten the movie or it did not closely follow the
book. As World War II draws to a
close, four characters are left behind in a half-bombed-out villa in
Italy. Hana, a nurse, is from
Canada and so is the soldier Caravaggio.
The Sihk spends his days locating and defusing mines. The English patient emerged from the
North African desert badly burned and unidentifiable. He is not English after all. Eventually his identity is discovered and much is revealed
about the war in the desert.

Julia Glass, Three Junes
(2002). This three-part novel won
the National Book Award for fiction.
It begins with Paul, recently widowed, who attempts to ameliorate his
grief by joining a tour group to Greece.
The second part, six years later, is set in Paul’s home in
Scotland. We meet Paul’s sons
David, an uptight veterinarian, Dennis, a chef in Paris, and Fenno, a bookstore
owner in Manhattan. Once again, we
see that each dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way. Yet five years later, we visit Paul’s
home in Greece and through the eyes of a young woman Paul met on his tour, more
is revealed about the family.
There is a strong thread of mystery in this novel as the characters and
their stories are gradually revealed.

Nevada Barr, Burn
(2010). Anna Pidgeon is on leave
from the Park Service and staying with a friend in New Orleans. She is supposed to be recuperating from
her latest life-threatening adventure.
She is not supposed to be investigating voodoo, missing persons, and
murder.

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006).
The public personas bear little resemblance to the private identities of
the major characters in this novel.
The widow concierge of a wealthy Paris apartment building and the
twelve-year-old daughter of one of the resident families begin to recognize
each other’s true identities. They
learn much about themselves in the process. This delightful novel is both comic and poignant.

John LeCarre, A
Most Wanted Man (2008). Absolutely no one is to be trusted in
this tale of espionage in Hamburg, Germany. A young Russian refugee, an idealistic young lawyer, and a
third-generation Scottish international banker are spun and manipulated by
competing and bureaucratic anti-terrorist spy agencies of Germany, Britain and
the USA.

Stuart Woods, Fresh Disasters (2007). Stone Barrington,
former NYPD cop turned lawyer, handles the more distasteful matters for a
prestigious NYC law firm. His
secretary and office manager Joan has just scolded him about the imbalance
between income and expenses when he receives a lucrative assignment he would
like to refuse. In the course of
representing the client, who is far from truthful and his own worst enemy,
Stone finds himself on the wrong side of the mafia. The pace is fast and the plot is twisty.

Julian Symons, The Blackheath Poisonings: A Victorian Murder Mystery (1978).
This mystery features two eccentric and unlivable houses, one dark and
gloomy and build like a church and the other is styled as an Italian villa,
full of windows and sprawling inconveniently behind its columns. The family members are as eccentric as
the houses. The initial murder
goes undetected because it would be scandalous for the family doctor to decline
to issue a death certificate.
There’s plenty of social comedy to spice the mystery.

P. B. Ryan, Still Life with Murder (2003).
Set in Boston in the late 1860s, both the Civil War and Irish
immigration provide the historical background for this story of family pride,
loyalties, and deception. Nell
Sweeny, Irish maid to the wealthy Hewitt family, demonstrates considerable wit
and courage as she assists her mistress in unraveling the mystery.

Laura Childs, The English Breakfast Murder (2003).
This is not as cozy a mystery as the title suggests. Theo Browning, a
woman of a certain age, runs the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, SC. In the course of assisting
hatching loggerhead turtles in finding their moonlight path to the sea, she
discovers a body floating the waves.
She is convinced that the victim’s interest in sunken treasure has
something to do with his murder.